A dozen horses sacrificed nearly 2,500 years ago in full-dress regalia have
been recovered frozen in a Scythian kurgan, or tumulus, near the village of
Berel in Kazakhstan's Bukhtarma Valley. "A discovery like this occurs
perhaps twice a century," says Henri-Paul Francfort, director of the
French-Italian-Kazakh team excavating the horses, which were preserved with
their skin, hair, harnesses, and saddles intact. This is the first time a
Scythian kurgan in Central Asia's Altai Mountains has yielded such a
massive sacrifice of horses with all their equipment and finery in place.

A war-like nomadic people (see "All That Glitters Is Scythian"), the Scythians are known to have
invaded Syria and Judea and sacked Nineveh and Babylon, yet their tumuli,
scattered across the northern Black Sea steppe and Central Asia, are the
sole monuments attesting their ancient might. "Even the most humble
Scythian was buried in a kurgan," says Francfort. "To be sure, he would
have been accompanied by only one horse, or sometimes only its head or
horse figurines."

The horses were found buried side by side on a bed of birch bark next to a
funeral chamber containing the pillaged burial of two Scythian nobles. The
horses appear to have been left undisturbed. The wooden cheek pieces of
their harnesses are carved with animal figures, while their saddles are
decorated with gold leaf, leather, and felt and rested on red saddle
blankets. Each horse appears to have worn ornaments relating to an animal
commonly represented in Scythian art. Ibex horns fashioned out of wood were
discovered near one horse and appear to have been worn on its head, while a
griffin sculpture with leather horns was recovered near another pair of
false horns.

A griffin sculpture with leather horns was found among the remains of a dozen horses sacrificed at the burial of their masters 2,500 years ago. (Courtesy Mission Archéologique Française en Asie Centrale) [LARGER IMAGE]

The Altai Mountains are famous for frigid temperatures that aid in the
preservation of bodies; ice sheets rapidly imprison burials, preventing
decomposition. Francfort encountered enormous difficulties excavating this
past summer because rising temperatures threatened to melt and decompose
the remains of the horses, which had to be chopped out of the ice in blocks
and rushed into a freezer truck as temperatures rose. "There wasn't any
question of proceeding like a classic excavation," says Francfort. "We had
to cut out the blocks without taking the time to examine the discoveries.
All we had time to do was identify the remains, cut them out, and pack them
up."

This winter, in the comfort of a laboratory in Almaty, the Kazakh capital,
Francfort's team--from the French Archaeological Mission to Central Asia,
Italy's Ligabue Research Center, and the Institute of Archaeology Margulan
of Kazakhstan--will conduct a minute excavation of the frozen blocks while
specialists perform biomolecular tests on the human and animal remains.